Part Forty-Two

8 days out of Altaruk - sundown

Sitting propped against a stunted palm barely Houri's height, next to the shallow muddy pool of Humbel's oasis. He pushed us hard to reach it by nightfall, and we are all exhausted. I've been too worn out to do anything but fall over into my blankets at the end of each day's ride. Tonight I think I can put off sleep long enough to mark the occasion.

Cactuses again, short and round, and blackish-green in the twilight, crowned with bell-shaped flowers that opened up when the sun went down. Keep hearing wings fluttering around out past the camp. Bats, maybe, wanting the flowers.

Blooms are nearly too fragrant to bear, but they're a sight better than the stench of the mud by the water. Humbel swears the water is safe, and Kaylene backs him, but I'll drink what we brought from Altaruk as long as I can. Water that smelly can't be good for you.

8 days out of Altaruk - night

Woke up with a start a couple of hours ago, hearing Houri talking near me, low and throaty amusement in her voice. A stranger's voice answered her, a man, speaking elvish. I propped myself up on one elbow, blinking sleep out of my eyes, and spotted her on the edge of the firelight, sitting on her haunches and toying with a red-fletched arrow as she conversed with a tall, skinny figure who stood just outside the reach of the light.

I sat bolt upright. "Elves!" I said, still half-asleep, catching sight of furtive movement in the shadows all round the camp, and realizing murkily that we were probably in the middle of a fair-sized band of them.

"Filthy half-breed," snapped the elf, without turning his head, and I came all the way awake. Humbel was crouching across from me, watching the figures slide from shadow to shadow, his face tense and his bow across his knees. Around the fire the others sat or knelt or stood and stared warily out into the darkness. They couldn't see the elves, but they could hear them, for they weren't taking any pains to keep their voices down as they wound toward the camp, avoiding the cactuses and rocks with contemptuous ease despite the uncertain light.

"What's going on, Houri?" said Micha, quietly, his gaze flicking here and there, straining to follow the voices around the camp. "What do they want?"

"Petronia," said Houri, and now I was certain I could hear poorly suppressed mirth in her voice. "The chief wants to spend the night with her."

"What?"

She shrugged and stood up, sliding the arrow into the quiver she wore on her back. The elf spoke and she translated, her words falling into an odd cadence as she picked up the pattern of his speech. "He says it's their oasis. He says we're trespassing. He says the chief will have the girl tonight, or we'll give up two of the water kanks and all of the food kanks. Or..."

"Or?" Micha was so angry he was shaking. He moved in front of Petronia, putting her between him and one of the kanks.

"Or there can be a duel."

"What kind of a duel?" From Unok, of course, always interested in a fight.

Houri's words blended with those of the elf till it seemed they spoke with one voice. "One of us will fight one of you. If you choose the fighter, we choose the weapon. If you choose the weapon, we choose the fighter." At this the elf looked right at me and smiled broadly, showing his teeth. "No armor. No poison. No magic." He flipped his hand negligently at Kaylene. "We fight until the duelist yields or dies. If you win, you win the right to stay at our oasis tonight. If you lose, the girl shares our hospitality until the morning."

I strained my eyes in the dark and saw a half-dozen small fires spring up as I watched, the elves unrolling blankets and tents and tethering their animals without concern for the drama being played out beside our fire. When the wind shifted I caught the thick, rank, scent of erdlu and heard them squawking and muttering out beyond the cactuses--there must have been a hundred birds out there, by the smell alone. A few of the elves were coming into the firelight now, men and women both, confident, excited, murmuring to each other in their own tongue, sizing Unok and Daphne up and directing scornful, belligerent glances first at me, then at Humbel.

The demands were at once outrageous and deadly serious. I knew we'd have to duel; I could see no other course. I counted at least thirty elves in plain view, with likely half again that number engaged in tasks I couldn't see, herding the erdlu or scouting or simply hidden in the rocks, waiting to see whether we'd give them any trouble. Against them we had only ten, and most of our ten would be blind in the dark. Houri's loyalty was questionable--she was as apt to side with the elves as with us. Petronia was no fighter, Dar was scarcely her better, and I was still half-crippled from the rock I'd taken the day before. Micha wouldn't stand for the elves taking Petronia; nor would the Wavirs, if they'd any house honor in them. And without the kanks, we'd be dead in the desert inside of two days.

The elf waited impassively for our answer. It was clearly all the same to him whether we fought or gave in. I looked at Unok and knew he'd come to the same conclusion as I had; his blanket was at his feet and he was already stripping off his head-scarf and tunic. "Tell him daggers," he said, and the elf said something sharp and scornful, and Houri chuckled and nodded back to him. I shook my daggers from my sheaths and held them out to Unok, hilt-first. He took them both, nodding at me gratefully, but handed one back after the elf spat at my feet and snarled, "One dagger."

The word of the fight was rippling through the elves like wind through the grass, hissing calls turning heads, narrow bodies stalking and weaving through their tents towards our fire. A handful of young elves slid lightly into our camp and stripped the stones from a circle of ground, piling them in a neat ring to mark the boundaries of the duel. One elf stepped into the circle and peeled off his own robes, revealing a long frame tracked with scars and corded with more muscle than I expected. He shook his braid back, stretched, and drew his own curved, wide-bladed dagger--steel, winking in the firelight, and my heart took a dive for my sandals.

Most knife-fights I've seen are a mess of shallow cuts and slashes, and it's only when the nicks and scrapes add up to exhaustion that someone slips up and gets gutted. But this was not the back-and-forth, circling, feinting dance that I expected--this was tooth and nail with blades thrown in for good measure. They clutched at each other, broke apart long enough for Unok to gasp, "Yield?" and grappled again, stabbing viciously and aiming straight for the vitals. Every time a blade found flesh it left deep and dreadful wounds behind. "Yield?" panted the elf, and Unok spat blood and went at him with his teeth bared.

I was within a heartbeat of crying yield, myself, when I saw Unok's gory face and realized he would sooner die than break honor with Mahuli and let the elves take Petronia away with them. Until then I was ready to stop it and send her over rather than see him dead in the dirt again--she'd'a been all right, in the end. People have borne worse and lived. Micha'd kick, maybe, but Petronia has a sweet heart and I think she'd have agreed to it, given the choice between Unok's death and a few hours of her own discomfort. But I knew Unok would have none of it, so all I could do was watch and gnaw my knuckles as the fighters began to stagger from losing so much blood.

The elf realized the stakes, too, and he didn't care to die over what to him was no more than an evening's entertainment. When Unok finally stabbed him high in the side, hard enough to snap a rib and forcing the air out of his lungs in a grunt I could hear all the way across camp, he knew he'd had enough. He flung his dagger into the ground and put up his hand, ignoring the catcalls of his mates with a good deal more dignity than I'd be able to muster in a similar situation. Unok stood back, gasping, and nodded his head, and the elves hissed as their champion hobbled into the darkness, supported by two of his friends.

Kaylene got to Unok before I could, and seared half his wounds shut by the time I got there. You crazy bastard, I said, after I got a good look at the extent of his injuries. He damn near killed you! I won, he said, and sat down hard. That's all that matters.

After they'd put the rocks back where they belonged, the elves left us to our own devices. We made shift to sleep as well as we could while they whooped and hollered as loudly as if they'd won the duel. By the sounds of it, the celebration will be going on a while, so I've had all the rest I'm going to get tonight. May as well stay on watch and let the others sleep if they can.

8 days out of Altaruk - near midnight

Sitting and talking with Humbel. Unok nodded off about an hour ago and we are the only ones awake in our camp, which is a mystery to me 'cos the elven revel is in full force only scant yards from our fire. You'd think those damned elves would settle in after awhile, if only to rest themselves after a hard day's run.

Houri is out there somewhere. She got up from the fire after the fight and vanished into the elven camp. I'm not the only one wondering whether she'll be back. Unok thinks she might have had something to do with the duel. I wouldn't be surprised.

The more I talk to Humbel, the more likable I find him. Got off on the wrong foot with him, I think, and so long as I behave myself he isn't going to hold the other night over my head. We've been telling stories between the spaces when we're not watching the elves kick up sand in one of their innumerable wrestling matches, accompanied by hoots and songs and drunken, good-natured insults yelled between fires. By the look on his face he likes elves about as much as I do.

He asked me where we'd come from before Altaruk, so I spoke of the Tsalaxa fort in Ablath, and the spiders, and the giant and the Tyr-storm. In return he told a tale of seeing a nightmare beast once, at a distance. "And going the other direction," he said, with an exaggerated shudder, and we both chortled loud enough to make Unok roll over in his blankets and mutter threateningly in his sleep from the other side of the fire.

Humbel gave me news of Balic, as well. When old Dropsy sank his silt schooner last year, the merchant houses moved fast and hard in his wake, setting up a triumvirate government which split the city between Tomblador, Rees, and Wavir. As in Raam, each major house got its own gate and its own sector of the city, which it manages under the auspices of the new council. Unlike Raam, the templarate was kept largely intact, save for the eviction o'the bureaus from the compound outside the White Palace to the old Wavir quarters farther down the King's Parade. The Wavir family got to live in the Palace--quite a coup, from what I gather--and moved all their traders into the newly-vacated templarate. That's where we'll be going once we get into town.

Humbel says they ran an election to determine who'd hold the top positions in the new regime, but he shrugged the same as any Balican when I asked him if it made any difference. It's still money and favors what make the winners win, and we all know it. Maybe now the politicking goes all the way to the top instead of being confined to the templar referendums, but the votes are still sold to whoever pays a fair price.

They call the templars constables now, and they answer to the council instead of the king. In terms of city management they kept the duties they always had--maintaining roads, overseeing civil projects, registering births and deaths, managing the levy, and so forth. Law enforcement's a bit muddier this early in the game, for the line between merchant-citizen and Balican citizen is getting blurry and the templars are often hamstrung trying to keep order in a city where the Houses get to say who is and who isn't under their jurisdiction. But the triumvirate settled on the templarate as the only non-partisan way to keep order in the city, and with three houses to fight over their pockets, the templars have to at least make a pretense at being fair-handed.

In a year we'll see where things are. If the triumvirate system works out, and the templars maintain their autonomy, they could keep the city from going the way that Raam did. In the meantime, it's all very dicey, so Humbel says we should stick to the Wavir sector so as to avoid any trouble.

Literacy is legal, magic is not, and slavery is teetering back and forth. I'm glad for the first, 'cos I wasn't looking forward to telling Unok he had to burn that book he's been laboring over since before Tyr. Also, my fingers are so stained from all this writing I'd have to scrub half my skin off before I could risk showing my hands anywhere in town.

As for magic, Humbel implies that I'll be all right if I'm under the protection of a particular house, which will be Wavir until we're paid and sent on our way... or until Lucius Petronius finds out what's going on with Micha and his daughter, in which case we'll be lucky if he doesn't have the lot of us tossed into the Tongue. His plans for her aside, if we can't deliver Petronia to Wavir, the house could be moved to make an example out of us for messing into Wavir business without asking, Mahuli hirelings or no.

Ah, well, we'll come to that when we come to it, I guess. In any case, magic isn't much used as a basis for persecution anymore, unless you're too independently-minded to be bought, or you get caught in one house's territory while you're working for another. I plan to keep my head down anyway, so I shouldn't have to worry overmuch about either situation.

Asked him what he had to do with magic, on account of him knowing so much about the subject. Turns out Dar is his brother, or half-brother if you want to pick bones over it, but I get the feeling they were raised close as full brothers and treat each other that way.

on to Part 43